You can call a TV show art and TV writers artists, as it allows you to call yourself an artist.
You forget you still work in the entertainment industry, whose main purpose is entertaining people. It's an industry, as in you have a client, an order and your order should match your client's requests because the client pays for it.
Of course, somebody skilled, with a vision and power can turn entertainment into some form of art, appease the network while doing something extra. It takes a David Chase, a Matthew Weiner, a David Lynch, a Mike Schur or a Vince Gilligan.
And that's precisely the issue with Cult. It tried to be an arty and edgy show, but it ultimately lacked the talent required to sustain any kind of interest, entertainment or artistic. O'Bannon can be entertaining but he was trying to do Art with a capital A, and in the end he didn't deliver on any of these two fronts.
And this is why the show even aired:
http://collider.com/mark-pedowitz-carrie-diaries-wonder-woman-amazon-i nterview/
Mark Pedowitz asked his crew what show they hadn't picked up in the last few years but thought they should have aired. And he got the script for the pilot of Cult, developed five years ago and thought it was "really good".
But it doesn't just take a "great" idea to make a great show. It takes development. Why do you think that FX has such a good track record? They've got The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, Justified, The Americans, The League and a few others, all shows that carry a strong vision... Graham Yost and a few others explain that they do get memos from the FX executives and that these memos are actually helpful. They don't agree with each suggestion, but the people who wrote them clearly think about the show. They think about development. And by answering these concerns, the writers manage to get a stronger idea about what they're writing about. George Lucas had enough money and autonomy to produce three prequels to Star Wars, but he had no concern, no stupid executive writing him a memo about what they didn't like about the scripts. And he basically shot a flawed first draft.
Cult lacked development in the same way. You could switch the lead couple with the one from The Beauty and The Beast at any minute. The villains were opaque and unentertaining. The stakes weren't tangible. The writing on the show-within-the-show was hammy, but so was the writing on the actual show, that was supposed to be real life.
Anybody competent executive could have noticed these flaws, even without an idea to fix them. The audience actually realized what was wrong, and it weighed more in the balance than what was supposedly right. The writers were clueless, as they seemed to operate in autarchy and complete disconnect from real life.
Just one thing: the show-within-the-show was supposed to be shot verbatim from the shooting scripts written by Steven Rae. On all TV shows, even the ones run by control freaks, the director and the cast are allowed to change a few lines because some words can work on the sheet, not on set. You then have to change a few things in edit because the pace didn't go as expected, new inspirations appeared, and all episodes must in the end have the same length within a few seconds span (for syndication). It happens on every set and editor's room. Even Stanley Kubrick embraced a good ad-lib or a different approach by his actors. By all accounts, "Cult" by Steven Rae should be a terrible show, but strangely it isn't supposed to be.
I know when I watch a cop show that the writers weren't cops and I shouldn't expect realism or even verisimilitude. But, here, the writers for a TV show had no real inside knowledge about how a TV show was produced and it was more of a problem.
Fringe might have been a generic show in its freshman year, but there were a few things working right from the start. Walter Bishop was a riveting character. Inside of an action man and a girl who supports him, you had a strong willed woman who fired the gun and Peter Bishop who stayed in the background, which made for an original and interesting pairing. And they had a "monster of the week" format with clues about a bigger mystery peppered all over the seaon. Cult had a serialized approach right from the start but the first five or seven episodes were basically about an opaque character, Sakelik, who was killed approximately ten minutes after she started to show some depth and emotions. Then, focus switched on Stuart Reynolds, who was a little more interesting but wasn't even allowed to die on-screen (which shows how expandable he was).
And now we were supposed to focus on the Circle of Erasmus, because of a supposedly misinterpreted symbol reused from the pilot and nothing else. Compare this to the Twin Towers in the first Fringe finale, which was a shocker but actually make sense when you looked back at the entire season. Or the hatch for LOST.
Actually, if you want to be a good TV writer, the first thing to do is write strong, memorable and riveting characters, something Cult totally lacked. Star Trek: TNG was below par during the first two seasons but four or five characters already stood out. The pilot for How I Met Your Mother wasn't great but they got Neil Patrick Harris as Barney, while they originally had in mind a smaller and chubbier guy. They embraced Harris after his audition and they had something working right from the start.
Art should be an inspiration or an objective, not a given. It's laughable coming from a mere staff writer, whose scripts are at best rewritten by an entire team. And it's still laughable from a star, head writer or showrunner, as they usually use that claim to behave like a diva. But rules and reality apply even if you call yourself an artist. Every real talent on TV is able to express something true, strong and original while remembering they have butts to keep on the couch in front of the set for an hour or half an hour and that the same butts have to be back next week. It was obvious that Cult wasn't that show, and it makes it even more cruel that its Friday night slot was taken over by reruns of "Oh Sit!"
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